Sault Ste. Marie man experiences ’hunt of a lifetime’

“It was the hunt of a lifetime, really,” said Sault Ste. Marie resident, reflecting on the bull elk he took on Dec. 10 while hunting in the Lower Peninsula. “It was just the most fantastic hunt I have ever been on.”

As the longtime proprietor of Hank’s Sport Shop, he applied every year for an elk permit — always coming up empty in the drawing.

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“I’ve been selling them as long as they’ve been doing it (holding the drawing) and I couldn’t get one,” said Hank, adding he believed he had applied every single year.

He finally overcame the long odds, receiving his notice from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources that his name had been drawn for the 2013 December hunt.

“It’s an honor to get one,” he explained. “It’s a very slim chance of ever getting one — when I got one I said, ‘Hell, I won the lottery’.”

Hank was originally planning to take his trusty 30.06 in pursuit of an elk only to find it wasn’t functioning properly in the weeks leading up to his hunt. His fall back rifle, a model 70 Winchester, .270-caliber, also came to be in the family’s hands through another stroke of good fortune.

“My wife won it at one of those Whitetail Banquets they used to have,” he recalled with good humor. “I never won anything at those things.”

Hank credited his son Leon for finding the right hunting grounds as the two teamed up to visit the Canadian Creek Ranch for the December hunt. Leon was there to assist his father the first two days, but had to return to his work in Lansing before the end of the weeklong hunt.

“We saw glimpses of elk every day,” said Hank, noting that the thick brush made it difficult to get the crosshairs on any animal. “You had to do everything in such a (expletive) hurry.”

On the fourth day, however, Hank caught a break when a group of bull elk were spotted.

“There were five bulls together, but I couldn’t get a shot at them,” he said, again emphasizing the difficulty posed by the thick brush. One of the bulls briefly stopped in a clearing and Hank touched the trigger at 250 yards.

“It looked like it flinched,” he said of the immediate reaction of the animal. “Then it ran through an opening and into thick cover where you couldn’t even see it.”

Noting he was 78 years old and had undergone three open heart surgeries, Hank admitted he couldn’t walk very far across the snow-covered terrain. But that changed when word came down from above that he had successfully harvest a big bull.

“Then I had to go up the hill,” he said.

Hank was especially grateful to the camp volunteers in the wake of his harvest.

“They got on the phone and called the camp,” he recalled. “They brought a monster tractor to pick him up and hauled him down — I didn’t have to touch it.”

Hank said the subsequent gutting revealed his bullet had hit the bull right in the heart.

“Everyone said, ‘what a great shot,’ and it was a good shot, but it wasn’t anything scientific on my part,” he explained.

Hank’s bull dressed out at 435 pounds and is currently aging at Love’s Meats in Rudyard for about a week before the animal is processed. As a retired shop keeper, Hank said he didn’t have enough disposable income to have the head mounted by a taxidermist and will likely go the European route saving money by keeping just the head and skull as a permanent reminder of his most memorable hunt.